REH's Worms of the Earth/Little People/Children of the Night

[deuce]

I could've put this thread in a couple of other sub-forums, but this seemed best. Let's start with a quote from a Lovecraft letter to Howard:


Now the heliolithic culture, which extends all the way from Ireland across Europe and North-Africa to Arabia, India, South China, Melanesia, Polynesia, and even Mexico and Peru, is pretty definitely associated with the small, dark Mediterranean race, and is known to have had nothing whatever to do with any branch of Nordics. It probably arose in the Mediterranean region and spread in all available directions—in many cases overriding previous primitive cultures and influencing other races. But where its artifacts are the earliest, as in the British Isles, we may reasonably conclude that it was the first culture of any permanence on the given site, and that its users were of the Mediterranean race that evolved it.

I believe, therefore, that it will be difficult to prove that the British Isles (possibly a part of the continent at the time of first settlement) had any civilised, half-civilised, or even advancedly savage inhabitants prior to the coming of the dark neolithic Mediterraneans. The sub-human reliquiae represent stocks which could scarcely have survived the glacial periods, and it is my guess that the incoming Mediterraneans found the terrain fairly well devoid of bipedal fauna. There may have been some of the squat Mongoloids now represented by the Lapps, for it is known that they once reached down extensively into Western Europe; being probably the stock amongst whom the witch-cult (a fertility religion arising in a pastoral and pre-agricultural age) and rite of the witches' sabbath took their source. But evidence seems to have been against their having penetrated the British area to any extent.

It is true that the Celts share most vigorously the myth-cycle of fairies, gnomes and little people, which anthropologists and all over western Europe (in a distinctive form marking it off from the general Aryan personification system which produced fauns, satyrs, dryads, etc.) and attribute to vague memories of contact with the Mongoloids which was wholly prior to their invasion of Britain. Since these fair Nordic Celts found a smaller, darker race in Britain and Ireland, there is a tendency on the part of some to be misled, and to assume that the "little people" legends allude to contact with those dark aborigines. This, however, can clearly be disproved by analysis of the myths; for such myths invariably share with the parallel Continent myths the specific features (or traces of these features) of having the "little people" essentially repulsive & monstrous, subterraneous in their habits of dwelling, and given to a queer kind of hissing discourse.

Now this kind of thing does not apply to Mediterraneans—who are not abnormal or repulsive from the Nordic standpoint, (being very similar in features) who did not live underground, and whose language (possibly of a lost branch, but conceivably proto-Hamitic, Hamitic, or even Semitic) could scarcely have suggested hissing. The inevitable probability is that all the Nordics met with this old Mongoloid stock at a very early date, when it shared the continent with the northward-spreading Mediterraneans and with the remnants of other paleolithic and neolithic races now lost to history; and that after the ensuing conquest the defeated Mongoloids took to deep woods and caves, and survived for a long time as malignantly vindictive foes of their huge blond conquerors—carrying on a guerrilla harassing and sinking so low in the anthropological scale that they became bywords of dread and repulsion. The memory of these beings could not but be very strong among the Nordics, (as well as among such Mediterraneans and Alpines as may have encountered them) so that a fixed body of legend was produced—to be carried wherever Celtic or Teutonic tribes might wander. But this is rather a digression...

-- H. P. Lovecraft to Robert E. Howard, 20 Jul 1930

REH replied on August 9th with this quote:

Your observations regarding the Mongoloid aborigines and their relation to the fairy-tales of western Europe especially interested me. I had supposed, without inquiring very deeply into the matter, that these legends were based on contact with the earlier Mediterraneans, and indeed, wrote a story on that assumption which appeared some years ago in Weird Tales -- 'The Lost Race'. I readily see the truth of your remarks, that a Mongoloid race must have been responsible for the myths of the Little People....



Howard's ideas about the genesis and lineage of the "Little People" had been nebulous. HPL's remarks (and Arthur Machen's writings) helped bring them more into focus.

[kemp]

REH’s take on Picts is that they are the ‘small dark Mediterranean aborigines of Britain’, and that western Europe was once inhabited by a small, dark people of a Neolithic culture known under various names, and who struggled to survive in the face of Celtic and Teutonic invasion, not to mention the Romans, as in the tales concerning King Bran Mak Morn of the Picts.


REH was no fan of the Romans stating ‘I was an instinctive enemy of Rome; what more natural that that I should instinctively ally myself with her enemies, more especially as these enemies had successfully resisted all attempts at subjugation’.


It was with REH’s image of Romans and Picts in mind that I went back to reading his stories of ancient Britain.


I recently reread the ‘The Lost Race’, a story that drives home the antiquity of the Pictish people, the capture of the Briton Cororuc by the remnants of true Picts that dwelled in underground caverns, and the tale told by the ancient of how the Picts once ruled Britain, the coming of the Celts that drove out and enslaved the Picts, other Picts fleeing west and north and eventually mingling with other races.


The Picts that captured Cororuc belonged to a group of Picts that took to the ravines, caves and caverns, coming out at night to take their vengeance on the people that took their lands.


‘That the tales which the ancient Gaels told of the Picts, already warped, would become even more warped from age to age, to result in tales of elves, dwarfs, trolls and fairies, at first accepted and then rejected, entire, by the race of men, just as the Neanderthal monsters resulted in tales of goblins an ogres.’

[kemp]

In ‘Worms of the Earth’ Bran Mak Morn muses how the Picts once covered western Europe in one vast ‘Dark Empire’ before the coming of the Aryans who eventually split into Celts, Hellenes and Germans, and how he heard about a Pictish people called the Basques in the Pyrenees who considered themselves unconquered, but who had paid tribute to the ancestors of the Gaels, a Celtic people, for centuries, and that only the Picts of Caledonia had remained truly free.


The ancient ‘worms of the Earth’ who inhabited Britain prior to the Picts, the people that Bran seeks out to aid him against Tirus Sulla, are more problematic in their identification. The Picts had displaced these earlier people just as the Aryans had somewhat displayed the Picts.


Atla the were woman commented


‘Remember it was your folk who, so long ago, cut the thread that bound Them to human life. They were almost human then-they overspread the land and knew the sunlight. Now they have drawn apart. They know not the sunlight and they shun the light of the moon. Even the starlight they hate. Far, far apart they have drawn, who might have been men in time, but for the spears of your ancestors.’


They ‘might’ have been Neanderthals, the ones that resulted in tales of goblins and ogres, but ‘Worms of the Earth’ makes no mention that it is the case.


To get the Black Stone back, the ‘worms’ destroy the Tower of Trajan by destroying the foundations of the castle structure via their underground tunnels and caverns that crisscrossed the land, and carried Sulla away from his chamber by burrowing into the chamber from an underground access point.


Bran’s revulsion of these monstrous beings is made evident when he gets a glimpse of one of these subterranean creatures.


‘One segment of the mass detached itself for an instant and Bran cried out in fierce revulsion, though he caught only a fleeting glimpse of the thing, had only a brief impression of a broad strangely flattened head, pendulous writhing lips that bared curved pointed fangs, and a hideously misshapen, dwarfish body that seemed mottled-all set off by those unwinking reptilian eyes. Gods!-the myths had prepared him for horror in human aspect, horror induced by bestial visage and stunned deformity-but this was the horror of nightmare and the night.’

[kemp]

In relation to the Picts themselves REH was aware of the differing theories on the question of the Picts and who they were.


He wrote ‘I am of course aware that my use of the term might be questioned. The people who are known in history as Picts are named variously as Celts, aborigines, or even Germans. Some authorities maintain they came into Britain after the Britons, and just before coming of the Gaels. The ‘wild Picts of Galloway’, which figure largely in early Scottish history and legendary, were doubtless of a very mixed race-probably predominantly Celtic, both Cymric and Gaelic, and speaking a sort of bastard Cymric, adulterated with elements of Gaelic and aborigine, of which later strain there must have been quite a percentage in the blood of the Picts. There might have been considerable Germanic or Scandinavian mixture, as well. Probably the term ‘Picts’ was properly applied to the wandering Celtic tribe which settled in Galloway and presumably conquered and was absorbed by the aboriginal population. But to me ’Pict’ must always refer to the small dark Mediterranean aborigines of Britain’.


REH took the various strands from his own researches on the Picts wherever he could find them, and using his own imagination created his very own Howardian Pict for the Bran Mak Morn stories.


‘When I was about twelve I spent a short time in New Orleans and found in a Canal Street library a book detailing the pageant of British history from prehistoric times up to –I believe-the Norman conquest. It was written for school-boys and told in an interesting and romantic style, probably with many historical inaccuracies. But there I first learned of the small dark people which first settled Britain, and they were referred to as Picts. I had always felt a strange interest in the term and the people, and now I felt a driving absorption regarding them. The writer painted the aborigines in no more admirable light than had other historians whose works I had read. His Picts were made to be sly; furtive, unwarlike, and altogether inferior to the races which followed-which was doubtless true. And yet I felt a strong sympathy for this people, and then and there adopted them as a medium of connection with ancient times. I made them a strong warlike race of barbarians, gave them an honourable history of past glories, and created for them a great king-one Bran Mak Morn’.

[Deleted]

Excellent essay by Bobby Derie: 

Conan and the Little People: Robert E. Howard and Lovecraft’s Theory
onanunderwood5.blogspot.com/2019/01/conan-and-little-people-robert-e-howard.html